FCC Approves SoftBank Buying Sprint Buying Clearwire

Sprint needs the spectrum

This is good news for Sprint and the mobile market in the US. In order for Sprint to remain competitive, they MUST expand the reach of their network. Here in Michigan, outside the major urban centers, only Verizon and AT&T offer service, due to the fact that they are the incumbent cellular carriers. Any spectrum about 800 MHz simply doesn't cut it in the rural areas. Rural customers travel much greater distances than urban customers, which means that when using a carrier that operates on AWS, PCS, or anything of higher frequency, you will likely be without service when travelling away from a town. I understand why carriers don't want to put much effort into rural areas, since there aren't many potential customers, but this is the side effect...(continues)

The SoftBank Merger has NOTHING to do with spectrum, if it did have ANYTHING to do with spectrum they would not have killed off iDEN, which did have to do with valuable spectrum. Sprint's major drawback has been they have been using the PCS band for cellular, 1xRTT and EVDO. They were partners with Clearwire so they could use the WiMAX which runs in the 2.5 Ghz range. All of which have horrible penetration when it comes to buildings, trees, and distance.

With Sprint refarming the 806–824Mhz and 851–869Mhz will give sprint not only valuable spectrum for CDMA and LTE, but a Competitive edge against Verizon and AT&T as well as other regional carriers through out the country that use the Cellular bands.

I definitely would love to see more competition in the market. Like I said, it's the rural areas of the country that need to see more competition the most. Here in Michigan, a majority of the land area is covered by Verizon and AT&T. T-Mobile's network coverage is abysmal in the state and Sprint is so-so. Where I grew up, and where my family still lives, there are only Verizon and AT&T as choices. It'll be really interesting to see what Sprint and T-Mobile do in the future in terms of expanding their reaches.

Take a look at the following: http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/3703-potent ial-sprint-rural-buildout-by-2016/

It's going to take a while but the answer is that in many markets there is a potential for improved rural coverage not only as a result of the inherent characteristics of SMR 800 (lower free-space path losses) but also as a result of build out requirements.

CDMA 800 (1x-RTT) is expected to be deployed on approximately 95% and LTE 800 is expected to deployed on approximately 80% of Sprint's post-Network Vision cell site count of +/-39,000 (Fairly close to the number of cell sites that VZW and T have, BTW).

I'm very excited to see Network Vision unfold. I'm a very happy Verizon customer, but I would love to see another carrier compete head-to-head coverage wise with Verizon but still able to keep costs down. I've only ever had Verizon or AT&T services in my life because of the limited coverage of Sprint & T-Mobile, but I look forward to the day that the coverage disparity closes.